Over the last two decades, significant changes in the environment of pharmaceutical regulation have occurred and have resulted in incremental adjustments in regulatory approaches to product quality. These changes included an increased number of pharmaceutical products and a greater role of medicines in health care, decreased frequency of manufacturing inspections as a result of fewer resources available for pharmaceutical manufacturing inspections, accumulation of experience with, “and lessons learned from”, various approaches to the regulation of product quality, advances in the pharmaceutical sciences and manufacturing technologies, application of biotechnology in drug discovery and manufacturing, advances in the science and management of quality and, globalization of the pharmaceutical industry. The cumulative impact of these changes has been greater than the sum of the parts and there is an industry wide need to develop integrated approaches to monitor and assess the validation of processes and overall quality of products provided to end users and patients.
Looking ahead the most up-to-date concepts of risk management and quality systems approaches should be incorporated while continuing to ensure product quality. The latest scientific advances in pharmaceutical manufacturing and technology are encouraged. Additionally, the submission review program and the inspection program should operate in a coordinated and synergistic manner and regulation and manufacturing standards should be applied consistently. The management of validation and quality assurance programs should encourage innovation in the pharmaceutical manufacturing sector in order to provide the most effective public health protection. Resource limitations prevent uniformly intensive coverage of all pharmaceutical products and production. Significant advances in the pharmaceutical sciences and in manufacturing technologies have occurred over the last two decades. While this knowledge has been incorporated in an ongoing manner into product quality regulation, the fundamental nature of the changes dictates a thorough evaluation of the science base to ensure that product quality assurance and validation not only incorporates up-to-date science, but also encourages further advances in technology. Integrated quality systems orientation principles from various innovative approaches to manufacturing quality that have been developed in the past decade should be evaluated for applicability and cGMP requirements and related pre-approval requirements should be evaluated according to applicable principles. In addition, interaction of the pre-market CMC review process and the application of cGMP requirements should be evaluated as an integrated system.
With the globalization of pharmaceutical manufacturing requires a global approach to integration keeping in mind the overall objective of strong public health protection. To accomplish these needed goals there is a need to carry out the following actions. The artisan should use emerging science and data analysis to enhance validation and quality assurance programs to target the highest risk areas. From the aforementioned, the evaluation of the feasibility of establishing dedicated and integrated cadres of pharmaceutical validation and quality assurance experts should become readily apparent to one of ordinary skill in the art. Also apparent to one of ordinary skill in the art is the ability to provide a cost-efficient network of validation and quality assurance protocols. By providing an integrated and user friendly approach to validation and quality assurance the overall benefit to the public at-large is pharmaceutical end products available at lower costs. This is turn will allow more persons or animals to benefit from innovations that occur in the treatment of disease. Additionally, there is also a need to use these modalities as research tools to monitor, assess, and further the state of the art in all areas of life science treatment and studies, specifically biotechnology and pharmaceuticals.